Joe Lieberman: not exactly a Nazi, but an apologist for Nazi activities.

Last night I met the Connecticut Post's Peter Urban at the Press Club (free taco night!) and he told me how Lieberman apologized for waterboarding in an interview. Say what?

Lieberman was one of 45 senators who voted Wednesday in opposition to a bill that would limit the CIA to the 19 interrogation techniques outlined in the Army field manual. That manual prohibits waterboarding, a method where detainees typically are strapped to a bench and have water poured into their mouth and nose making them feel as if they will drown.

The Senate passed the measure.

"We are at war," Lieberman said. "I know enough from public statements made by Osama bin Laden and others as well as classified information I see to know the terrorists are actively planning, plotting to attack us again. I want our government to be able to gather information again within both the law and Geneva Convention."

A couple months back, my friend Malcolm Nance testified before Congress about having been waterboarded. This is from the Washington Post's write-up.

Unlike attorney general nominee Michael B. Mukasey, who called the technique repugnant but declined to say whether it is torture, Nance said unequivocally that waterboarding is a long-standing form of torture used by history's most brutal governments, including those of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, North Korea, Iraq, the Soviet Union and the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia.

Now, I notice from Andrew that the Nazis might not have used waterboarding as an officially approved tactic, but if Nance said it happened, it happened. So Lieberman is in approval of things that the commandants did to our relatives in the camps. And yet he looks in the mirror and sees the only thing standing between civilization and its destruction.

Don't bother telling me I'm shrill or that this is a reductio ad Hitlerum. Lieberman is an example of vice endlessly telling itself that it is virtue. He gets what he deserves.